I have converted the add-on Flares Wizard to run on Blender 2.8. I am not the original author of the add-on. The add-on ran on Blender 2.79, but it appears that the author has not responded to questions to update it to 2.8, so I took it upon myself to do an update, as it’s a really fantastic add-on.

I have all but two things working. One of them involves the Lens Fare Elements list:

In the v dropdown button to the right of the list, there are options to Show All, Hide All, and Solo the selected list element. I have gotten these three options to work. Here is an example of how the Solo option works (which both shows and hides flare elements):

What I can’t figure out is how to make the individual elements in the list hide/show by clicking on its associated eyeball icon to the right of the element name. I can click on the eyeball icons and it appears something happens (Cycles redraws the image), but nothing really happens. Likewise, when I perform one of the Show All, Hide All, or Solo options, it doesn’t change the eyeball icon status for the individual elements.

Hi,
I install your 2.80 version and got this error : “fake_module: addon missing ‘bl_info’ gives bad performance!”.
I order to avoid this, add a folder in your zip file.
I find an error in the init file, line 1607, you wrote set_select instead of select_set.

Terrific – thanks, @Elreenys! That fixes that issue. I added some additional code to keep the Lens Flare Elements items’ visibility in sync when you choose the Show All, Hide All, and Solo options, so that’s all working as it should.

There’s just one last issue I’m trying to work through. When I click on the “Use obstacles” checkbox and there is an object in the “Use obstacles” listbox, the flare goes away (when Viewport Shading is set to Rendered) and an error is thrown in the console window:

I can only find the math.bvhtree documentation for the 2.78 API, so I’m not sure what changed in the 2.80 API. I thought that since it’s complaining about finding a scene, I needed to set scn to bpy.context.view_layer (as I have had to do in other spots of the code), but that doesn’t seem to work.

Here is a blend file that is set up to show the issue. Simply click on the “Use obstacles” checkbox and you’ll see the behavior.

I’ve altered some of the internal math that seemed to have been skewing the results of a few elements (specifically Star and LensDirt)
There seemed to have been some hardcoded ‘magic numbers’ that didn’t make much sense in my debugging.

Hi!
Thanks so much for this update for 2.8! It took some searching but I finally found it!
So, I realize this is a rather old thread, but I had some issues with the add-on I though maybe you could help.

The issue I ran into is when I check “Transparent” under the Film settings in the Render Properties, the flares don’t show up in the render at all, they do in the rendered viewport, but not the actual render. The reason I’d like to render with a transparent background is because these flares lag my scene quite a bit, and I figured since the lens flare is basically just an overlay, I can render just those out on a transparent background and add them back to the final render later.

So, I’m not sure if there’s a fix for this, but if you know one, I’d be very grateful if you could help me out.

Thanks! Huh, that is weird, I did notice something along the lines like the flares need something “behind” it to show up. But I’m not sure if this will solve my problem, I’d like to export the render results as PNGs with alpha channels, and overlay the image sequence over the finished render. Can that be done in the compositor somehow?

I’ve been trying out stuff over the past 2 hours but the best I could come up with is to plug the image output of the render layer to the alpha socket of the composite node haha. In the meantime I’ve been looking for answers and found the culprit. It’s the add shader in the lens flare material nodes. I found this question where the person had the same issue. I’ll think what I’ll do is render out my animation first, then composite the flares over afterwards with the alpha over node. I think it’s my best shot.